Palabras in Each Fist Read online

Praise for Rebecca Balcárcel's chapbook, Ferry Crossing:

  “ . . . the opening poem is breathtaking -- as well as what follows.” -- Naomi Shihab Nye

  Advance praise for Palabras in Each Fist:

  “ . . . powerful emotional honesty . . . These poems are riveting and unforgettable, leaving the reader redeemed through the acceptance of self, radiant in the 'bright holiness of now.'” -- Larry Thomas, 2008 Texas Poet Laureate

  Palabras in Each Fist

  by Rebecca Balcárcel

  Copyright 2013 Rebecca Balcárcel

  Palabras in Each Fist by Rebecca Balcárcel is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

  You may copy, share, and even include this work in your own creations, provided that you give credit to the poet and do not earn money from the sale of her work. Please purchase additional copies if you use more than a class set of four poems. Ask permission for uses beyond these by contacting the author. Thank you!

  Acknowledgments

  The author expresses appreciation to the following magazines in which these poems first appeared:

  North American Review: “Kitchen Clock” and “Guatemala”

  Muse Squared: “Christmas Performance” and “Shoes”

  Clockwatch Review: “Ferry Crossing”

  New Texas: “For a Son” and “Ophelia”

  South Dakota Review: “Crepe Myrtles”

  Sacred Journey: “Watching Two-year-old Twins Eat Watermelon,”

  Ilya’s Honey: “One Time, a Girl”

  Kaleidoscope: “Tympanogram at Three Years”

  5AM: “Teeth”

  Amarillo Bay: “Visiting Tía”

  Red River Review: “Against The Wall”

  Handmaiden: “Questioning the Flood”

  Langdon Review: “Ay, Yolanda!,” “Boy Picking Flower,” “Christening” and “Ave America”

  3rd Muse: “Illiterate”

  Descant: “Shoe-shopping”

  Diner: “Interrupted While Reading”

  Many thanks, too, to Trilobite Press for publishing the author’s chapbook, Ferry Crossing. A few poems from that chapbook also appear in Palabras in Each Fist.

  Ongoing appreciation goes to Pecan Grove Press and its late editor, Palmer Hall, who published the print version of Palabras in Each Fist in 2010.

  Palabras in Each Fist

  “I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.” —Richard Feynman

  Contents

  Part 1: Alfabeto/Alphabet

  Part 2: Palabras/Words

  Teacher's Guide

  Reading Group Discussion Questions

  About the Author

  Poem List

  Part 1: Alfabeto/Alphabet

  Guatemala

  Walking the Lake Path

  Crepe Myrtles

  Visiting Tía

  Kitchen Clock

  This is how I met Perla

  Illiterate

  Spinning My Planet

  Ay, Yolanda!

  Clean Break

  Christening

  Ave America

  Christmas Performance

  Mi Hija, You’ll Love This

  Shoe Shopping

  Gum

  No Shoes

  One Time, A Girl

  The Namers

  After the Accident

  Birthday Present from Grandma

  Against the Wall

  Ophelia

  Part 2: Palabras/Words

  Hearing the Baby, 1:00am

  Watching Two-Year-Old Twins Eat Watermelon

  Interrupted While Reading

  Spotless Teakettle

  Tympanogram at Three Years

  Communication Baseball

  “Boy Picking Flower,” Colored by Five-Year-Old

  May Snowstorm

  This Kid

  For A Son

  Newton’s Laws of Family Motion

  Teeth

  Sweeping the Kitchen

  Impasse

  Pompeii on the Discovery Channel

  Retreat

  Is the self

  Self-Forgiveness

  Prayer By Kite

  Questioning the Flood

  Ferry Crossing

  Part 1: Alfabeto/Alphabet

  Guatemala

  Guatemala was a place inside my closet. It was a crumpled tissue- paper flower six inches across. Guatemala was a stack of workbooks that read “Un pájaro. Dos gatos . . .” bought too late or worked too fast so that none of those dancing syllables would pair up in my head. Guatemala was wire hangers wearing ruts in the shoulders of vestidos, dresses inappropriate for all occasions in northwest Iowa, each skirt zig-zagged with pink guacamayas, crazy green quetzales shouting at me from each short sleeve. Teasing me, my navy blues and forests. Catcalling, like the blacktopped boys hanging out against the Dairy Queen, boys with butterscotch skin shouting roller coaster words, looping their exotic syllables up a scale, flicking cartwheel sounds, leaving me excited and sick, amazed to be noticed and wanting to hide. Which I could almost do in my turtleneck and walking shorts, my knee socks and penny loafers, if only I didn't show my eyes which were obviously chocolate, obviously giddy , frightened, certainly curious and filling fast with wonder at what I might let myself be—and do—with a disreputable hispano boy. I looked straight ahead. Kept walking. And these Dairy Queen boys I stuffed to the back of my closet, with the crumpled flower, the taunting dresses, with the workbooks of the lilting language of my father's country, Guatemala.

  *

  Walking the Lake Path

  I walk the dirt path with Abuelita.

  Lake Atitlán laps no-yes-yes

  against the bank.

  My mind spins in Texan,

  a Ford motor in fourth;

  hers is quetzal wings

  beating, footfalls of panther at top speed.

  This morning she chuckled stories.“Imagina!”

  A translator stitched her syllables

  into the jail cell wedding, the tale

  of hidden chicken nests,

  a girl's pirated eggs.

  Her mouth and mine know “no,”

  but each eye shines yes

  and yes. Silence weaves

  its white cloth between us.

  At a shaded place, I hold

  one unfinished edge,

  she the other.

  *

  Crepe Myrtles

  Those in full sun

  have cracked open

  their round cases and flounced out

  their ruffles, hot pink vestidos.

  They sway under el sol

  whole bunches! and unfurl their fiesta frills

  from June to September.

  We watch their salsas, their boleros,

  their cha chas. Mira! my aunt shouts

  every time we pass. And every time we pass,

  they bob and curtsey, they twirl

  their sizzling fringe.

  This was my introduction to passion:

  flowers, the way they explode

  into curls of crepe, and my aunt,

  the way she soul-sings the old canciones,

  right through drought, through these long,

  tangled days after the accident,

  sometimes through clenched teeth.

  This is what I knew of spirit,

  espíritu, that molten stream,

  before I ever wrote a poem,

  before it turned me inside-out,

  like the blossoms.

  *

  Visiting Tía

  Where I come from,

  groups of furniture are suites,

  every outfit has its own set


  of shoes, but at the house of my tía,

  we wipe our hands on mismatched

  dish-towels, flatten balls of harina into tortillas.

  All morning, I am part of

  he warm kitchen, bubbling frijoles,

  hot gorditas in lidded baskets.

  I become the “q” in Bequi, my nickname,

  learning the art of tomato-seasoned rice.

  I wear Tía's apron; the cousins braid my hair.

  I almost fit

  My halting steps in the new language

  relax to a saunter. When I trip

  over verb endings, Tía picks me up.

  Uncles and cousins ramble in for lunch.

  We crowd ten around a table for six—

  lap children, folding chairs.

  And after marimbas, it's Pedro Infante

  rolling out songs I might learn how to dance to.

  *

  Kitchen Clock

  A fork pitches each stabbed minute

  over its shoulder; the hour hand

  scrapes its knife blade

  around a sixty-minute plate.

  Each second is a water drop

  pinging a stainless steel sink.

  She hears that ping punctuate

  the morning's instructions, counterpoint

  the clicking of silverware at dinner.

  Each second is pennies, ping,

  in a coffee can, savings to send south

  across three borders by King Express.

  Each ping is a prayer

  murmured over a roasting hen,

  a plea for the son who pitches

  accent over his shoulder, struts

  to the school bus, scraps marimba records

  for CD's, shiny as blades.

  And while she gives employer's girl

  sixty-minute plaits, three-thousand six hundred

  pings have slid down her throat to

  her stomach, where muscles tighten

  around pricking tines

  every time she checks the kitchen clock.

  *

  This is how I met Perla,

  also standing at the edge of the room, also keeping eyes and ears open, mouth shut, also seeking the shadows among the crowd and noise of a cousin's Quincañera. After tasting how my presence would season the silence, she spoke. “Mi esposo,” nodding towards a man standing up at a table, laughing too loudly, setting his empty glass, wobbling, among several others. Spanish class had given me a few words. When she said this, “My husband,” I understood. To ask her age, I held up my fingers, flashing all ten, then nine. She flashed back ten and eight; we giggled. Then she began talking, as if I could understand, as if her earnestness could ferry meaning. She began in a hushed tone. “Baby.” Then shaking her head, loosed a long chain of sounds, to my ears like Legos pouring onto tile or Lite-Brite pegs falling into a cannister. She bit her lip, grabbed my forearms, finally crossed herself, and repeated a word I recognized: “nada.” Placing her hand on her abdomen, she again said, “Nothing.” She had spoken to me, la Americana, the one who would enter a university in the fall, the one who could reply only with silent understanding, the one who would not spread rumors after mass. She gripped my hand, looked at me with eyes the color of fertile soil.

  *

  Illiterate

  Every morning he buys a paper

  and turns to page three over coffee.

  He scans the sea before him.

  His son is learning i and he finds one.

  He steps on i's across two columns.

  He finds capital I and walks the shape

  in his mind: a street with two dead ends,

  the short alley between birth point and death,

  a bar propping apart two unknowns

  that would otherwise spring shut.

  *

  Spinning My Planet

  “No problem. Plate of cake,” he says,

  the idiom free throw bouncing off the rim.

  I'm still searching for “piece”

  when the foreign student presents me with the ball,

  carried in brown hands from the other side

  of cedar plank fence.

  His jaunt walk stops the Hi at my lips.

  His smile, a three-point swish,

  falls into my eyes as I place one tan hand

  across Spalding, one below NBA.

  For a moment four hands hold the Earth still.

  Coffees next to creams.

  Again I am behind, pronouncing Thank . . .

  as he steps backwards, waves.

  My breath stalls on his gingersnap eyes,

  the cut of his jaw, as he turns, Oh, why

  am I not wearing something pretty?

  spinning my planet, Why did I cut my hair?

  as he steps lightly Gotta lose this baseball cap

  back to his side of the world.

  *

  Ay, Yolanda!

  You spun a plate on each index finger, carried English in one teacup ear, tucked a branch of Spanish bougainvillea behind the other; you double-dutch jumped the old and new countries like skipping ropes, your pigtails swinging North, South, feet landing on each side of the sidewalk crack without a miss-pronunciation.

  You threw tortilla in the first toaster slot, Pop-tart in the second; right-handed the pencil at Central Junior High, left-handed the skillet en la casa; you wept at Univisíon telenovelas, laughed at CBS sit-coms, flung puns in both languages, juggled two O's on your tongue: the Latin o, the Anglo oh.

  Ay, my cousin! I studied you through the single lens of my Cloroxed context, caught palabras—your Spanish syllables—in each fist. You walked, tough act, baby sister on each hip, and I follow, my eyes on your black, maize-silk hair, parted down the middle.

  *

  Clean Break

  Looking up from a sink of suds, hot water,

  and a freshly scraped plate,

  I'm All-American, wedged into a suburb—

  formica backsplash, factory-spat switch plate,

  Pfizer faucet gashed with electric light.

  I'm white.

  But looking down, I see brown

  arms, brown hands dipping into bubbles

  a chip on the plate's rim, and I could be

  Abuela, my grandmother,

  washing in a basin of river water,

  her dishrag rubbing swift circles,

  her laughter clattering over patio tiles.

  Back against warm adobe, I, Abuelita,

  could tell stories— a son's corncob cars

  brought to Mass, a daughter's stick doll

  swinging cornsilk skirts, and the priest

  bursting into the jail cell where I

  held the hand of the boy I ran off with,

  where our parents gathered outside the bars

  where the priest married us en punto,

  on the spot.

  I unfurl tales in ribbons of Español, and even

  my grand-daughter, la Americana,

  curls one around each finger.

  Her blood remembers our sashays of phrase.

  Her hands, twins to mine, plump the soft vowels.

  She joins the giggling, the knowing nods.

  Without effort she swims in idiom,

  turns each conjugation, inhales punchlines.

  She takes her place at our table,

  savors our ways, our histories,

  our multi-syllabic nouns.

  *

  Christening

  My father's name should have been

  Sinforoso, according to the leather-bound book

  that ascribes to each day a saint,

  to each day its own light, making the calendar

  a wheel of candles.

  The seventh son of Sinforoso was Federico,

  a name my grandmother jingled on her tongue,

  shortened to sweet Lico. So

  the wide-faced boy grew up Lico,

  seven spaces removed from

  the full
sun of Sinforoso.

  Rosalina was to be Thomasa, a name

  her grandmother actually called her,

  as this was proper, and because “Rosalina”

  was chosen without even a gesture

  toward the leather-bound book, and only

  for the ringing and fall of the syllables.

  So this little one grew up with her back

  to the stone church wall.

  When these two married and named

  their babies, the candle-wheel broken,

  each day was only its number.

  The leather-bound book:

  lost, its letters scrambled.

  So Rebecca, Juan Carlos, and Antonio

  grew up searching for wheels

  of leather and candle books,

  with their faces toward wired lights

  their backs against sheet-rock.

  *

  Ave America

  —for Dad

  Plenty of corn, no tortillas:

  Iowa 1968, and only her eyes—

  my Peace Corps girl—

  speak my flamenco, my Latino

  hers the only heat slicing

  through snowstorm, starestorm,

  blue eyes and blond hair storm and, hombre,

  it's November and zero degrees

  when I walk off the plane into marriage, into the GED.

  I swing a night-school-English machete

  until I'm a Bachelor of Arts cum laude,

  and why not Husband, I'm thinking,

  why not Lover, Novio, French Kisser,

  why not Tender Toucher of Arts,

  why not Heartbeat, Drumbeat, Got-the-beat

  Man or Woman, certified.

  Plenty of corn; at last tortillas:

  flat as social security cards,

  circular as compass on-the-dough,

  no woman's hand, no grandma's pan,

  fat packages side-by-side, airtight with twist-tie

  cornmeal abacus in the deep freeze.

  My mother writes, what is America?

  is dancing the alarm-clocked sunrise,

  dancing fútbol turned soccer dancing taco

  turned Bell. I ballroom to classroom,

  teach the Tango, the lingo, the trying-hard gringo.

  School-teacher trot, chase-the-mortgage cha cha,

  dance for mí familia, dance for my life.

  *

  Christmas Performance

  In front of the altar rail, I sang

  “La Noche Buena” with Father.

  I laid out Spanish syllables by rote,

  setting empty freight cars on the line

  of melody, my Anglo upbringing obscured

  by the swing of my straight black hair.

  Mom savored “Felíz Navidad” from the front pew,

  the words exotic caramels unwrapped for her

  by two years in Peace Corps, Guatemala.

  Father strummed the guitar

  brought from his homeland on a 727,

  diving without accent into liquid lyrics.

  He cheered the room with his red woven shirt

  trimmed in ribbons and gold foil thread.

  I wore a dress I hated— a hot pink spill

  fringed with orange animals. On the second row,

  a boy from school stuck out his tongue.

  My mouth opened at the right times,

  pronounced lullaby vowels, rocked farmers' wives

  into holiday warmth. “How lovely,” they

  murmured afterwards, seeing a Cassatt painting:

  “Latin Girl Sings With Father.”